IA - how to demonstrate academic integrity

Step 1:

Understand exactly what plagiarism is...

Taking someone else’s words or ideas and presenting them as your own work is known as plagiarism. But how much do you need to change something before it becomes a legitimate re-working?

The paragraph below is taken from Pharmacology (4^th edition, 1999) by Rang, Dale and Ritter. Study the essay extracts in the table and decide whether or not you consider the author of the work to be guilty of plagiarism – some may be more obvious than others!

"During the last 60 years the development of effective and safe drugs to deal with bacterial infections has revolutionised medical treatment, and the morbidity and mortality from microbial disease have been dramatically reduced."

With permission from Chris Willmott

The original article can be found in Journal of Biological Education (2003) 37 (3) pp 139 to 140

PLAGIARISM - THE ANSWERS

1. The first version listed is an ‘ice-breaker’. It is clearly a verbatim account and is thus seriously guilty of plagiarism.
2. The second version is marginally better, but is still not acceptable. The original work has been acknowledged as a source of ideas and information, but no indication has been made that the text itself has actually been used.
3. In this case the addition of quote marks makes an important distinction from the previous versions. The author is clearly acknowledging that both the ideas and the word order have come from the textbook. It is not therefore guilty of plagiarism. We include this version to highlight a different weakness, namely that stringing together a series of quoted ‘chunks’ of text is a poor way to construct an essay and work written in this way is therefore likely to score low marks.
4. This version of the essay is fine. The quotation is indicated and is used in an appropriate way; it is being critiqued by the author and contrasted with a view supported by a second reference. Not plagiarised.
5. Here we get to the crux of the matter. The fifth and sixth versions of the essay are illustrations of practice that under-graduate students early in their studies consider acceptable but we do not. They are derivatives of the original work with only cosmetic alterations. The wording and sentence construction of version 5 bears a very close relationship with the source and is guilty of plagiarism.
6. Similarly, this is a ‘thesaurus-ed’ or word-swapping version of the same text. A few words have been replaced with synonyms but this is not sufficient to be considered new work.
7. The author of the final essay has made a serious attempt to produce a novel account of the subject. It is still not perfect — lined up as it is here with one original source document, there are still echoes of the thought processes within the work and we would ideally want the student to draw on a number of sources in order that the essay has genuine originality. Nevertheless, significant effort has gone into bringing freshness to the text and we would consider that this is not guilty of plagiarism.

With permission from Chris Willmott The original article can be found in Journal of Biological Education (2003) 37 (3) pp 139 to 140

Step 2:

Protect yourself right from the start of your IA.

• Use cite-this-for-me or Easybib or any other citation tool to create an MLA reference for any site that you look at during your research.
• If you copy and paste, immediately add "" and footnote the source using a full MLA reference.
• If you reword an idea, copy it into a google search and see if the original site comes up. If it does, you haven't changed enough for to to be different so reference it.